AHRC–ESRC Religion & Society
Programme Phase III
(presentation for ‘New Spiritualities’ workshop,
11 th May, 2011, Glasgow)
Chris Philo (University of Glasgow), PI
Louisa Cadman (University of Glasgow), RA
Jennifer Lea (Loughborough University), External
Consultant

• Sidling up to subject-matter of ‘new spiritualities’
• Post-phenomenology of the body; Foucauldian
‘biopolitics’/‘care of the self’
• Questions of physical/mental well-being ...
• Disciplinary background in Geography
• Asking about geographies of/in ‘new spiritualities’
• Where are they to be found? (uneven distributions? a meso-/macro-scale focus)
• How do spaces/places enter into their very working (the grain of socio-spatial life? a micro-scale focus)
• We are relative in-experts on ‘new spiritualities’!
• Key departure-point is claims of Paul Heelas, with
Linda Woodhead
• Centrality of the famous ‘Kendal’ study

• Echoing Heelas, we identify:
.. a crucial transformation from, to adapt his terminologies, an ‘outer-directed’ religious orientation – the traditional questing for the ‘word of God’, as an external being, and attending to the sites and statements of authorities sanctioned as ‘His’ emissaries on earth – to an ‘inner-directed’ spiritual sensibility – an openness to the
‘beyond’ or ‘unknown’ within, the internal resources and possibilities for enhancing the self, maybe aided by but not dependent upon the instruction of earthly others.
Interestingly, the latter openness may surface in belief-systems which posit external beings, other worlds, other levels of creation, and the like, thus retaining some external reference-points, but Heelas’s argument appears to be that, first and foremost, the impetus is towards self -realisation, meaning the development of the self
(into a ‘spirit’, ‘soul’, a ‘consciousness’, whatever) from materials, as it were, immanent to and within the self.
• New ‘spiritualities of the self’, ‘spiritualities of life’, ‘inner-life spiritualities’, ‘subjective life spiritualities’

• A ‘new-spiritual revolution’?
• Powerful connotation of all-consuming change, diffusing
everywhere, affecting everyone
• Calls forth critical responses
– Nothing really new? And, if there is, it is not really spiritual – tells us more about secularisation, commodification, therapeutics, governmentality ...
• Responses here are possibly not as opposed as might usually be thought?
– Can we be critical while still accepting a kernal of meaningful inner experience?
• Irony that the Heelas position simultaneously overstates (overgeneralises) the thesis of a ‘new-spiritual revolution’, while then
understating it (downplaying its significance) in other regards
– A claim with multiple geographical dimensions: enter Geography 1

A deeper drawback with the Heelas position may now swim into view, however, because his response to critics does end up narrowing around rather fewer people than the headline notion of a ‘spiritual revolution’ ostensibly entrains.
Notwithstanding some speculations to the contrary, the people who eventually appear as the ‘bearers’ of Heelas’s vision are indeed likely to be resident in or regular visitors to new-spiritual ‘communities’ such as those hosted in Kendal, Glastonbury and
Brighton, which then leaves the impression of a highly uneven geography to new lifespiritualities spread across a modern Western nation-state such as the UK. As it happens, we wish to resist any confident specification of this geography, not wanting to reduce it to a banal account of the Kendals of this world as new-spiritual oases surrounded by secular deserts, nor wanting to lapse into simplistic assumptions such as ‘you will not find new spiritualities in Northern ex-mining or textile towns or the regimented cul-de-sacs of the suburban South’. That there will be a geography, though, one with many complicating factors and countless ramifications for Heelastype claims about a ‘new-spiritual Britain’, is undoubted. One ramification, moreover, might be that Heelas himself risks an unnecessary retreat from the thesis of a ‘spiritual revolution’ if his response to critics sanctions a narrowing of its application only to both certain people – some posited minority of ‘authentic’ newspiritual practitioners – and certain places – this handful of ‘authentic’ new-spiritual islands. It may well be that we have to accept that some narrowing (socially and spatially) is required to evade the opposite trap of over-extending the Heelas thesis, but it may also be that considerable empirical openness needs to remain on such matters, at least for the moment.

• A further thought is that the ‘new spiritualities’ debate possibly becomes too worried about the coherence or otherwise of ‘newspiritual subjects’
• An aside of sorts: for all Heelas’s emphasis on practices, he smuggles back in a prioritising of a coherent, self-aware, articulate and somehow ‘authentic’ ‘new-spiritual self’?
• Might we instead accept/celebrate the incoherent spiritual self? – a focus arguably chiming with a focus on micro-times/spaces?
This perspective deepens the critique of the coherent self, since it introduces realms of the self that defy neat coherence, and it also keys into our geographical focus upon the moving (human) body, entering into and responding to specific time-space situations, while carrying experiences, learning and impulses across many more such situations, but never in a manner straightforwardly available for being self-consciously reported as, say, a comprehensive ‘map’ of a (spiritual) self-in-the-making.
A claim with multiple geographical dimensions: enter Geography 2

THEME QUESTION(S) METHOD(S)
Spiritual space-times
Spiritual identities
Spiritual authority
What relationship do spiritual practices have with wider structures in the city (e.g. economy, religious institutions, local government, health care, charities)?
Interviews with centre managers (x 6 ) and centre documentation
What does the spiritual mean (if anything) for those who engage in spiritual practices?
To what extent, and in what ways, do these practices configure, or provide a response to, their everyday use, understanding, and experience of the city?
Diaries (x 26 ) and interviews with diarists
(x 15 )
Are spiritualities of life:
-an extension of modern inward looking disciplinary subjectivities (similar to the ‘psy’ industries);
-more dispersed post-disciplinary subjectivities (in which we continuously seek to improve and adapt ourselves);
-or do they suggest something else (ie a different way of being in the city)?
What is the relationship between spiritual subjectivities and other aspects of individuals’ (subjective) life in the city (work, homelife, gender, class, sexuality, ‘lifestyle’ – also formal religious observance)?
What are the forms of truth enacted by spiritual ‘experts’?
What forms of power do these entail (affective, vital, transfigurative, post-disciplinary)
What modes of teaching/learning are involved?
Diaries (x 26 ) and interviews with diarists
(x 15 ); observant participation
Diaries (x 26 ) and interviews with diarists
(x 15 ); observant participation
Interviews (x 20 ) with yoga/meditation teachers, plus teaching/training guides

The New Urban Spiritual?
Selection of responses to questions about ‘spiritual beliefs’, from Interviews
(nb. the quotes here have often been taken from different parts of the same interview, which is why there is a lack of conversational flow in places; also, only where it might clarify matters, we have included the interviewer’s questions/prompts. Please do not quote anything from this document without permission from the researchers)
DIARIST 6
LC
R
LC
… And I’m just looking here, you say you’re a prac... you’re a Christian.
Yeah.
Um, and I was interested in how the yoga fits in with that, if it does, or not at all?
R It doesn’t ... there’s no problem with it. I know some people would say that that’s a problem, for me ... there’s not ... I suppose, yoga is something I do and my belief is something else ... [T]here’s no crossover in that sense at all.
LC ... We talked about, er, your Christian faith and whether there’s any hesitations because of that, and going to the Buddhist Centre, or whether you’re so...
R No ... I mean, … looking at all the Buddhist Centre stuff, I probably wouldn’t go on a course where there’s a lot of teaching about the Buddhist faith … I am actually quite interested in it, but ... that’s not what I want to do. I’m not interested in changing religion, I’m quite happy
[laughingly] with what I believe, and so all I’m interested [in] is … the aspect of Buddhist which is about focus …; that’s the aspect that I will take from it.
R Well, it’s interesting because my mum, who is a regular churchgoer – I wouldn’t say I go particularly regularly at all, but she does – and one of the things that they had a big

• We are not making big claims about epochal shifts sweeping across whole territories
• Rather, we are wishing always to be placing ‘new spiritualities’
(‘worlding’ them)
– Addressing questions of where and when at different spatial scales, albeit chiefly the micro or local
• Some attention to Brighton as a distinctive ‘new-spiritual place’
– Asking respondents also to consider other places relevant to their own
‘new-spiritual biographies’
– Sometimes gaining a sense of Brighton’s linkages/networkings with
other places, far and near

• More specifically, our project seeks to disclose the new times/spaces accompanying an individual’s engagement in likes of yoga/meditation
• Using diaries as a resource for
‘mapping’ an individual’s time-
geography of occupying/utilising the city
• And for detecting the place of ‘newspiritual practices’ within these microtimings and –spacings
• ‘Fitting’ into existing routines; with e/affects rippling out into the other times-spaces of a daily/weekly routine

• Issue of carving time-spaces of ‘stillness’ out of the increasingly pressured ‘ecology’ of work/social/family life in the city
• Issue of creating/sustaining new time-spaces of ‘new-spiritual practice’ that break with prior/habituated routines
– Making/breaking of habit; the challenge of securing self-transformation
– Particularly if not accompanied by a dramatic relocation of self
• Nothing all that surprising? – but, seen in time-geographic terms perhaps, a whole raft of minor spiritual ‘revolutions’
• Think of:
– People getting up much earlier, discovering ‘new’ hours of the day
– People reconfiguring the spaces of their own homes
– People finding, visiting and utilising new spaces in the city (link to the geography of ‘new-spiritual centres’ and other relevant sites) – and finding time in their days/weeks to incorporate these new spaces
– People encountering a whole assemblage of new resources (people, ideas, objects, literatures): potentially life-changing

• Horizon of the ‘very late’ Foucault (of the final three lecture series)
• Contra Western/Enlightenment sense of external Truth, appeal to Antiquity’s sense of internal truths
• Focus instead on practices of truth-telling: ‘styles of veridiction’ in how individuals come to tell the truth of/about/for themselves
- Proposes the need to recover alternative, experimental transformatory routes to truths
- Ones forged in the specific, vital engagements/tests of a life as lived: the raw materials for an individual’s truth-telling
• Explicitly talks at length about the practices (and politics) of spiritual self-transformation
• Weirdly, provides a blueprint for how we have come to regard the significance of the (micro-) ‘new times and spaces’ integral to ‘new-spiritual’ questing for internal truths